


bite the hand

by ihopethatyouburn



Category: Homeland
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:14:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27202303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihopethatyouburn/pseuds/ihopethatyouburn
Summary: Just before Carrie's second tour in Iraq, David Estes confesses his love.
Relationships: Carrie Mathison/David Estes
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	bite the hand

Spring 2009

The first time David Estes tells Carrie he loves her, it feels like an inevitability, though she’ll be the first to admit she doesn’t handle the truth with grace. They’re lying naked in a medium-nice Georgetown hotel bed with generic white sheets and a white textured bedspread and Carrie can feel the air growing heavy with purpose, a purpose she’s been avoiding but can’t wriggle out of now.

She has the top sheet draped lazily around her waist, not bothering to pull it up to cover her breasts. She’s done that since the beginning of their affair, which she’s always been clear about in her head, without coming up with a euphemism. At first, she liked to challenge him with her nakedness, a statement that she wasn’t going to be shy about the illicit nature of their relationship, wasn’t going to hide her body in shame. And then she felt like she couldn’t stop her brazen lounging after she’d started, laughing to herself as she thought about all the paintings of reclining nudes she’d seen at the National Gallery. She wondered how many of the subjects were _the other woman,_ like she was. Most of them, if she had to guess. Old guys in the 1800s didn’t paint naked pictures of their wives.

But the drawback of her refusal to put on clothes is that her nakedness eventually became familiar as the weeks passed. That’s really what made her self-conscious while listening to him give orders in work meetings: not that she’d gotten rug burn on her knees or that he liked to cum on her stomach, which she was actually kind of into, but that they’d have long conversations while he ran his fingers down her side, tracing the curves of her shoulder and her breast and her hip. The conversations were usually work-related, but not always. And one time she got her hair hopelessly caught in her earring during a particularly athletic evening and David was so careful as he untangled it, still inside her, that she could just tell he was falling in love with her. 

So his feelings aren’t a surprise, and he’s a direct enough guy that he’d want to say them out loud. He hates bullshit, always wants a straight answer, has no patience for case officers hedging their bets. 

“I’m falling in love with you,” David says, such a soft declaration for him, looking into her eyes at uncomfortably close range.

“I — I leave for Baghdad tomorrow.” Or more precisely, she leaves for New York City for final meetings and prep before she flies to Baghdad on Saturday; she’s going on her second tour, and she’ll be gone for two years at a minimum, he knows that. She was hoping to avoid a drawn-out farewell, and she thought she’d managed to do that, but she was too optimistic. 

“That’s all you have to say?”

Carrie sits up to get a better look at him, feeling extra vulnerable without her clothes on, fixated on the extra folds in her stomach that she gets when she slouches. 

“Thanks for telling me,” she tries, making sure she edits out the question mark she wants to put at the end of that sentence. She’d been anticipating this moment, but she still doesn’t know how to respond.

David’s eyes are wild, and the look on his face is so unlike him that it takes her a minute to place it: he’s embarrassed. 

“You don’t have to sound so scared,” he scoffs in defense.

“You’re married. I wasn’t exactly expecting this,” she lies, as if he needs a reminder that she’s met his wife, as if he doesn’t carefully take off his wedding band with the rest of his clothes, the action a bigger emphasis than leaving it on would be. 

She doesn’t love him, not even close, even though he’s whip-smart and drily funny and fucking great in bed. 

She doesn’t love him, though she’s starting to realize she doesn’t know what real adult love would feel like. 

“And like I said, I’m leaving tomorrow,” she continues.

“So you were just going to get on the plane without a real goodbye?”

“What is it you were imagining?” 

“I don’t know. It’s not like I _imagined_ anything. But I thought you’d at least seem upset to be leaving me behind.”

“We’re not — this isn’t —” Carrie is frustrated she can’t articulate what she’s thinking. “You aren’t mine to leave.” 

“What if I want to be yours?”

Her face softens a little, and he takes that as a partial win, threading his fingers through hers.

“That wasn’t the agreement.” She pulls her hand out of his.

“What agreement are you talking about?”

“You know what I mean. That this was only physical, and that we were only seeing each other because it was mutually convenient.”

“I don’t think we agreed on that at all.” David’s voice sounds threateningly dark.

“Fine, I must have assumed all those guidelines were in place.” They never spent much time discussing exactly what was going on between them, but Carrie always knew that he had the ultimate out — his family. She never thought he’d throw caution to the wind and jeopardize his relationship with his picture-perfect wife and son; a divorce wouldn’t fit his carefully curated image. 

He closes his eyes in defeat.

“I thought I was doing both of us a favor!” she says.

“Are these the rules you use with all the other married men you’re sleeping with?”

The insult stings, with the implication that she’s morally bankrupt, that she can’t possibly be warm or caring or discerning in any of her relationships. But Carrie knows it was constructed to do exactly that, no matter how casually thrown-off it seems, so she doesn’t cringe as much as he wants her to. 

“You’re the only married man I’m sleeping with right now,” she informs him fake-sweetly. 

David buries his head in his hands. “This is not how I wanted this conversation to go.”

Carrie feels both victorious that she dodged his jab, and guilty that she can’t give him the simple, happy _I love you_ back that he’s hoping for. But really, it’s not her fault that he picked the worst possible time to declare his love.

Frustrated by his lack of progress, David goes to take a shower. Carrie knows he’s expecting to continue their fight, discussion, whatever, after he’s done, but instead of waiting, she scrambles around to find her clothes as quickly as possible. She can’t be in that room any longer, suffocated by his expectations and earnest face. As soon as she’s dressed she grabs her phone and purse from the nightstand, finger-combs her hair with her other hand so it looks vaguely presentable, and slips out the door, closing it softly behind her.

In the hallway, she takes a minute to collect herself, hands balled into fists. She’s taking the easy way out, and knows that if David were watching he’d taunt her like he does at the office, trying to wound her ego, saying he didn’t know she was so scared of him, of his honesty, of something real.

+++++

She takes a cab back to her apartment, which is echoey and almost completely empty in preparation for her departure. She’s not usually packed and ready a whole twenty-four hours early like this, but Maggie came over last weekend to help her put everything in storage, which forced her hand a little. It doesn’t hurt that she’s had so much extra energy lately, a wave building to a crest for so long she’s just waiting for it to break. Her full suitcase is sitting by the foot of her bed, stocked and organized with Maggie’s help. 

Carrie turns her phone off, ignoring the missed calls and voicemails from David, feeling tense and unsteady. She takes a long hot shower, standing under the spray until she feels some of the stress melt away from her shoulders. She has to keep reminding herself to unclench her jaw, which has been hurting for the past two weeks while she’s been finalizing all the details of her move. 

After a fitful night’s sleep, she wakes up early and feels the empty day like a weight on top of her chest; she’s not supposed to leave for New York until the evening. She can’t lie still, though, so after some fruitless tossing and turning she decides to get on an earlier train. Out of bed and energized, she packs up the last few items she needs — her toothbrush, her meds — and triple-checks for her passport.

She closes and locks her front door an hour later and leaves the keys in the mailbox for the subletter, without any nostalgia for the two years she lived there. She’s never felt particularly attached to any of the homes she’s had, always looking forward to what was coming next, not wanting to be frozen in time. She has nothing keeping her in DC today, having already said her goodbyes to her family and Saul and Mira. She doesn’t have the first-overseas-posting jitters she dealt with before her first tour, that made her want to drive around and visit her favorite cafes and restaurants before she didn’t have access to them anymore.

In Union Station, as she struggles on the escalators with her bulky suitcase, she feels distinctly alone, and remembers the first time she left for Baghdad four years ago. Her dad was supposed to take her to the airport, but flaked out at the last minute. Saul and Mira were around to drive her instead, Mira tearing up at the departures drop-off and making her promise to call when she landed. It was nice to hear that someone other than her dad and Maggie was worrying about her. This time around, Saul checked in with her to make sure she had all her travel booked, but she’s on her own until she gets to her hotel in midtown Manhattan with all the other case officers who will be joining her in Iraq. 

On the train, Carrie stares out the window as she speeds out of DC, trying to focus on all the work she has cut out for her instead of the anemic disappointments she’s leaving behind.

+++++

The second time David Estes tells Carrie he loves her, they’re walking in circles around Bryant Park trying to negotiate a truce.

During her day of final briefings and strategy planning, she misses two calls from David. He doesn’t leave a follow-up voicemail, or send a text, so she doesn’t know what his angle is. And frankly, she’s too drained to figure out what he could want from her now. 

An hour after the last call, though, she hears a sharp knock on her hotel room door and he’s standing in the hallway, rocking back and forth a little on his toes.

“What the fuck, David?” She keeps her voice level so she doesn’t alert anyone in the surrounding rooms, but she can’t believe he’s actually here. 

“I had to come see you one last time.” 

“To do what?”

“Please, we need to talk,” he insists.

“I don’t really have anything to say.” And it’s true, she said everything she needed to the other night, even if she could have been nicer. She was always clear about her intentions, and he’d never, in any professional or personal capacity, asked her if she would delay her tour in Iraq.

Not that she would have stayed in DC even if David had presented it to her weeks ago; she’s been bored stateside for a while now, and she misses the adrenaline of being overseas. She’s spent the past few months reviewing the contact plan for each of her assets in her head, both those she reported to the agency and those she didn’t, ready to re-engage as soon as she can. She needs the chance to stretch her muscles and remind herself that she’s at her best when she’s in the field, every conversation a mental negotiation of big risk versus big reward. 

“Fine, I need to talk,” he amends his statement.

“Everyone else on this floor is with the agency,” Carrie warns. “Someone’s going to recognize you and ask you what you’re doing here.” 

He brushes her off. “I’ll come up with something.” 

“A case officer would have an excuse ready right away,” she half-teases, knowing that his mind is quick, but he’s sensitive about being the untrained boss of people who fake identities for a living. 

“Well, you can add that to the list of reasons why I’m not a case officer.” 

“Come on. If someone walks out of a room right now, what are you going to say?” she pushes. “I’m just trying to protect you.”

David smiles a little at that. “I was in the city already to meet with the head of the Far East division at the New York HQ, so I thought I’d stop by and say a few encouraging words to everyone before they head out to Baghdad.” 

“Good enough,” Carrie nods. It’s weak, but it’ll do. “Let me get my jacket. We’ll go for a walk.” 

They make their way down to the street silently, but Carrie feels angry words forming on her tongue: angry that he’s being so pushy, that he expects so much from her. Once they’re a block from the hotel, she starts talking.

“Now can you tell me what the fuck you’re doing here?”

“I just —” Now it’s David who can’t form full sentences. “I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I didn’t try to see you one more time.” 

She stays quiet for a moment, and then takes a deep breath. “I don’t understand what you think I owe you. You should be thrilled that you get a clean break.”

He sounds taken aback by the heat in her voice. “I don’t think you owe me anything.”

“You must want something from me, otherwise you wouldn’t be in New York right now.”

“You’re making this sound so transactional. I thought that what we had meant more to you.” 

“It meant something to you, not to me.” She’s telling the truth, but it hurts more than she wants David to see. Her youthful optimism is eroding, the optimism that used to remind her she had the rest of her life to fall in love, that she’ll find someone eventually. She’s been less and less sure of that lately.

They cut into Bryant Park and walk up the steps to start doing laps around the green, the twinkle lights in the trees seeming to mock their tense footfalls. 

“I felt different around you,” David says. “I don’t know how to explain it, exactly.”

He’s right about that, she can’t deny it. It took awhile, but he slowly started to let his guard down when it was just the two of them in an anonymous hotel room under an untraceable name. Carrie often felt a little unmoored from reality in those rooms, and David must have also, because eventually his smooth exterior started to crack. Not too badly, but enough that he became a recognizable and even impressive human being, asking her in-depth questions about her field work and weeks later recalling many more details than she expected. He talked about her assets as people, not as a means to an end, like he always did at work. He was caring and almost sweet, especially about his son, but what stuck with Carrie most was how smart he clearly was, so adaptable for someone who had never been stationed anywhere other than Langley. 

“I felt like you understood me. It was a break from feeling challenged every time I walked down the hallways by someone who didn’t think I deserved my job, and thought they could do it better than me, when there was so much happening behind the scenes that they couldn’t even dream about.” 

“You seemed like a real person,” Carrie says. “More than you ever did at the office.” 

“See, you even admit it.” He pauses, seeming to weigh his next question carefully. “What am I usually like at the office?”

“I don’t know. Slick, no-nonsense, a yes-man to the higher-ups.”

“And still, you wanted to fuck me?” He’s laughing a little, the mood lighter by a degree or two. “Why?”

It’s a fair question. 

“Yes,” she shrugs. “I thought you were hot.” 

“Ah.” 

“And even though you seemed kind of soulless, we definitely had something between us. Chemistry, someone might say.”

“Someone? But not you?” 

“I know what you’re doing,” she tells him. “You need me to say that we were good together.” 

“And weren’t we? Aren’t you going to miss me when you’re in Baghdad?” 

There are little things she’ll miss, like the satisfied laugh that starts from deep in his throat every time he makes her cum, and the ripple of his shoulder muscles underneath his work shirts, and the way he can guess if she’s in a wine or a tequila mood, but she wouldn’t go so far as to say she’ll miss _him._ The pieces are there, but they’re not adding up to a whole. 

He interprets her silence correctly, shaking his head. “I can’t believe this.”

“Can’t believe what?” she asks reluctantly.

“I convinced myself that you felt the same way about me.”

“I still don’t understand why you came all the way up here to tell me this. Did you think you were going to stop me from getting on the plane to Iraq?”

“Oh, God no,” David laughs. “Blind as I seem to be, I know I’d never be able to change your mind about this tour.”

“So why are you here?” Carrie tries her best not to sound accusatory. 

“I guess…” They stop walking in front of the fountain and listen to the running water for a moment. “I had a feeling that if I didn’t tell you all of this now, I never would. And I didn’t want to let this moment go by. So I just have to say again: I’m in love with you.”

Carrie sees a teenager walking behind them towards the park exit stop in his tracks when he hears David’s confession, fully prepared to make a patronizing _aww_ sound, until he sees Carrie’s stormy face and pivots away.

“Please, David. Go back home to your family.” 

The light in his eyes suddenly dims. He looks desperate, almost pathetic, which she’s never seen before. “You’re really saying you don’t feel anything for me?”

“God, are you fucking serious?” she snaps. “Don’t you think my whole life would be easier if I loved you back?” 

David opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything, confused. 

“Not my _whole_ life,” she clarifies, “since you outrank me, and neither of us would ever give up our jobs. But I spend so much time wondering if I’m ever going to fall in love with anybody.”

As soon as it’s out of her mouth she wants to take it back. She’s never said anything like that out loud before. But at least there’s no better place to spill her guts than a busy city park around dinnertime, with people in suits who won’t remember her words two minutes from now elbowing around her on their way to Grand Central, her admission floating in the air for just a moment until it disappears in a swirl of all the other plaintive too-true confessions that have happened today in this very spot.

“You will,” David says softly. 

“I can’t just say that I’m going to love someone and wait for it to happen. It doesn’t work like that.” 

If it did, she’d have found a partner years ago in one of the doctors Maggie keeps in touch with from her residency program, a few of whom she’s gone on dates with over the years: someone who works ungodly hours and won’t make her apologize for doing the same, who also feels a responsibility to the public, who isn’t so embedded in her work life as to seem borderline incestuous. But she never managed to cobble together a relationship with any of those men, perfect though they were on paper. If nothing else, Maggie is good at identifying men who Carrie _should_ be into, but the problem is that she doesn’t account for Carrie’s fucked-up emotional barometer, her need for at least a whisper of danger, a seed of doubt. 

“So you’re just giving me a blanket no? And that’s the end of it?”

“That’s the end of it,” Carrie confirms. “I can’t give you what you want.”

David lets out a deep sigh, resigned. “Okay.”

 _Was that worth chasing me up to New York?_ she wants to add, but decides against it. They’re still standing in front of the fountain, and she can tell they’ll end up in tourists’ photos if they don’t get out of the way soon. An awkward silence hangs in the air between them.

“Well,” she says. “I have to get going. Gotta make sure I’ve read through all the security briefings before we leave.”

He nods robotically, grabbing onto her flimsy excuse, his face carefully smooth and expressionless like it is in the office. “I have a lot of phone calls to make.”

After a moment he adds, “I guess I’ll hear from you once you get to Iraq.” Carrie opens her mouth to protest, but he cuts her off. “I just want the same progress reports everyone else sends.”

“That I can do.” 

“Be safe over there. I’m looking forward to hearing about your work.”

Carrie smiles tiredly at him. “Thank you. I will.”

He rubs her arm in a final goodbye before he starts walking downtown, looking in every direction but back at her.

She turns away from the park and walks aimlessly, looking for any bar that isn’t filled to the brim with bankers who work on Park Avenue, desperate to decompress with a couple shots of tequila before she returns to her hotel room to mentally prepare for Baghdad.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to greenpen for giving me this prompt when I said I wanted to write but was out of story ideas!
> 
> The title comes from a song of the same name by boygenius, which has the perfectly apropos chorus _I can't love you how you want me to._
> 
> If anyone is interested in reading Mira and Saul dropping Carrie off at the airport for her first tour in Baghdad, you can read an entire Mira-centric fic I wrote [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24263509).


End file.
